Wanted to do a quick link to several news items you may not have seen recently but that could end up having a huge impact on our wicked webbed world.

First, let's discuss Google Desktop. History - I do security stuff. On a whim, I spent some time looking at Google Desktop to see if I could hax0r it and be cool like the big guys. The version I looked at was 2.x and found that from a privacy standpoint they actually did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, based on things I'm reading at this page on Google's site, things they are a'changin. Basically, Google will now provide the option to store your indexes with all your content on their servers. It sounds cool, right? Yeah, but it's just one more piece of the pie that Google now has. That's all your documents wrapped up in a nice little package that they can view. Oops. Scary.

Next, more Google news. Apparently, according to this blog on zdnet, it appears Gmail is in the works to very shortly be able to manage email for other domains. Everyone knows that gmail is the webmail client interface of the moment. For Google to start selling management of others email domains would be a huge win for their business. Nobody really likes managing email, Gmail has the killer interface for it, and they'd get that much more data and potential advertising revenue. This one sounds like a win-win for everyone. Will I transfer my domains to them? I doubt it. I'm a paranoid weirdo and like having that stuff under my thumb.

Finally, it seems Yahoo! is trying to figure out new ways to get their search engine used. They're saying things like "we'll give you 5 free mp3s a month" or "here kid, have some frequent flyer miles" if you sign up to use their search engine. I don't know how successful this will be other than a nice gimmick to get people to try and use yahoo again. I wonder, though, will that be enough to sway people away from the GOOG?

These thoughts are my own, unless they're yours. And if they're yours, we
may have metaphysical problems beyond simple concept ownership and should
probably talk soon.